Outside of a Dog (25 page)

Even so, one has to find a way to reject one’s inner Ayer without throwing one’s sceptical babies out with the positivist bathwater. Scepticism is a defining quality of intelligence,
its free working is essential to democratic culture and education (as opposed to indoctrination) is impossible without it. But you don’t need to label a good deal of man’s deepest and
best beliefs ‘nonsense’ to prove yourself a sceptic. You have to be sceptical about your scepticism. After all, as Robert Frost observed, scepticism is merely that sort of
inquisitiveness that takes nothing for granted: does it consist of anything more, he asks, than ‘Well, what have we here?’

Like
Finnegans Wake
, which Joyce was writing at the same time,
Language, Truth and Logic
represents both the apotheosis and the
reductio ad absurdum
of a tradition. After
Joyce’s exhausting work, it is hard to imagine what further innovations a novelist might undertake: it is a book from which you can only go backwards. So, too,
Language, Truth and
Logic
defined so clearly the outer limits of philosophical scepticism as to make one back away from it, aware that if such a frame of mind leads to such conclusions, there must be something
wrong with the entire enterprise. Ultimately, Ayer is the Holden Caulfield of philosophy, childishly obsessed by phoniness. Indeed, if you throw out the term ‘nonsense’, and replace it
with, say, ‘difficult to verify using rigorous criteria’, then the force of Ayer’s argument is greatly diminished.

Great works of literature contain and convey truths, and if the processes needed to understand them are different from those of philosophy, they are truths nonetheless. Otherwise it would be
impossible to learn from literature, which certainly contradicts one’s constant sense of enlargement and enhancement in relishing the metaphysical poets, suffering through
Lear
, or
smiling at the modulated ironies of Jane Austen. The ‘truths’ one is exposed to through such reading are not simple ones, and are often, sadly, transmitted by sloppy readers as truisms:
gather ye rosebuds while ye may, be kind to your daughters even when they seem difficult, make a good and sensible marriage. Those are truths of a banal but universal sort, and we do not need our
great writers to remind us of them, only to make them glow. As George Eliot observed, ‘the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.’ It is the obligation of
poet and novelist to invite them back. And you don’t find any of them in
Language, Truth and Logic
.

Life was easier without Freddy Ayer, and I became, I think, a more agreeable and less contentious person released from his influence: less likely to reflexively seek counter-arguments, repel
‘emotive’ excess, demand verifiability. In any case, I had begun to believe that verification was an unsatisfactory principle, best replaced by Karl Popper’s insistence that
falsification is a more reliable procedure. If you sit, for the first time, under an apple tree and watch the apples falling, it may be some time before you regard it as inevitable that they will
continue to do so, and longer still until you posit the law of gravity. But if just one apple goes up rather than down, you will know that there was no such necessity after all, and no such
law.

So: goodbye Freddy? It didn’t turn out that way, not quite. Being infected by radical scepticism is like contracting malaria: you may seem to get over it, but it recurs unexpectedly.
It’s in your system, ineradicable. I’d experienced a decade of partial remission when I had a renewed outbreak of the fever, and it wasn’t difficult for me to locate the cause. It
was called by various names, but if I say ‘post-structuralism’ you may recognize what I mean.

It is a difficult term to define: indeed, since none of the associated figures (who included Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida), all responding to and rejecting structuralism, would have
described himself as a ‘post-structuralist’. The term is a generic one, and there is no adequate single definition, save an ostensive one. You want to know what post-structuralism is?
It’s him, and her, and this, and that. And if these writers didn’t themselves have imperialist ambitions, their followers certainly did. These crusaders invaded English departments
round the world, uncombatably aggressive, grimacing weirdly, speaking in a hideous foreign tongue, anxious to conquer and to convert.

All of a sudden, instead of English we seemed to have French, not the mellifluous French of Mallarmé, but an ugly, polysyllabic, hybrid tongue only comprehensible to members of the tribe.
Literature was superseded by
écriture
; the common pursuit of true judgement replaced by a culture in which readers replaced authors, relativism (and an associated multi-culturalism)
prevailed. A whole variety of ‘readings’ were suddenly creditable, and the text came to be regarded as a signifier for more important issues that lurked latently behind it. Texts were
puzzles, signs and symptoms, cultural artefacts.

I am, as I have said, an unregenerate practical critic. I believe that the greatest and most rewarding of readerly activities involves painstaking attention to the words on the page. And so it
was distinctly uncongenial to me to observe, over a period of years beginning in the late 1970s, that my best and brightest students were increasingly influenced by continental linguists,
philosophers, and psychoanalysts whose approach to literature – if they distinguished the ‘literary’ from other forms of ‘signification’ – had nothing of the
painstaking particularity that I associate with good reading.

English Studies has always suffered from a certain methodological softness, and these new writers seemed to offer something harder-edged and more intellectually challenging. There were difficult
new concepts to be mastered, and newly problematic ones (like ‘the author’, ‘the reader’, and ‘the text’) to be jettisoned or radically refined. Soon nobody
wanted to ‘read’ texts, they wanted to deconstruct them.

In spite of all post-structuralist argument to the contrary, the reader is not the maker of what he experiences. He is subjected to his author, imposed upon, invaded, possessed. He hears the
voices, is totally exposed to the characters of a novel, and has no control over their presence or absence. You can’t simply put a book down or away. Books are peculiarly adhesive. A throng
of characters clamorously demand attention, voices rise and fall, fade in and out of our consciousness. We suspend the everyday, ignore the telephone and doorbell, eat with our eyes fixed to the
page, overcome, ravaged by the demands of the text. It is no wonder that writers – who are the best readers – claim that books provide them with the best of friends. Dickens refers to
‘the friendships we form with books’, and Charles Lamb regarded books as ‘the best company’. Would Jacques Derrida agree?

Derrida’s
On Grammatology
(roughly: the science of writing) was a much-cited example of this radical new line of thought. Here is a representative paragraph, from Chapter 2:

And, what is worse, imagine someone less intelligent than Derrida trying to think along similar lines, and then applying their conclusions to English literature. The results
were harrowing. I remember sitting through lectures, seminars and presentations by over-excited practitioners of this new art, who were positively writhing with delight at their capacity to play
with this new set of linguistic structures, analytic tools, and conceptual categories.

I tried, oh how I tried. I’d had problems with these aggravating continentals before: Like Freddy Ayer, I’d never got on with metaphysics. What the hell is ‘time’? Or
‘being’? Or, indeed, ‘nothingness’? And who cares? I read the major texts painstakingly, then read them again because I forgot everything almost as soon as I had read it.
Even the second readings didn’t stick. (Try reading that Derrida quotation twice, and then make a précis of it.) It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. I was. How can a
teacher not be interested in material that excites his best students? No, the problem was that I hated it. Hated as in loathed and detested.

Hated as in A.J. Ayer: dismissively, contemptuously. ‘Nonsense!’ What a useful concept to revert to, what a terrific rejoinder. I slipped seamlessly into default mode, back to the
ludicrously self-assured, judgemental self of my high school years. I had the perfectly annoying habit, at seventeen, of lifting my index finger into the air and announcing – while in
discussion or argument – either
False!
(left finger) or
True!
(right finger). I thought of the fingers as Holden (left) and Allen (right) and believed that they provided
sufficient guidance to make my way through my emotional and intellectual life.

I thought of these inward voices and their finger-manifestations as opposites. I had need of both: of the capacity to distinguish the phoney from the true, to be both sceptical and enthusiastic.
It did not occur to me – curiously, stupidly – that my Holden and my Allen were manifestations of the same impulse. Both were outsiders, keen to subvert established values, unable to
enter into a community of like-minded fellowship. It was on the basis of such inward counsel – am I tempted to say, alas? – that I came to live in a foreign culture, to marry a women
maximally different from me, to choose a profession in which I was uncomfortable. To make of myself even more of an outsider, and to derive what comfort and amusement I could by observing the
distance between my inner world and my surroundings. Though I am now a dual citizen, both American and English, I am also neither, and now feel equally uncomfortable in both cultures, except on
those days when I don’t. When I finally came to locate a voice in which I was comfortable writing, I found that whatever my apparent subject, my real subject was me, observing myself,
indulging the discomforting ironies of a displaced person.

Nothing made me feel more alienated, more out of place, than this post-structuralist stuff. It was an example of an utterly unverifiable rhetoric, like a private language, which a clan of
initiates speak amongst themselves, like Yeats’s silly theosophists and Rosicrucians. Gibberish, as Evelyn Waugh would have pronounced it, with a hard ‘g’. My students (and their
teachers who were given over to this new material) had begun to behave like members of a secret society. They not only talked a different language, their faces registered varieties of
self-satisfaction and scorn usually reserved for scientologists. The jargon was appalling, and has been described by V.S. Naipaul as ‘a way for one clown to tell the other that he is in the
club’. I began to dislike them – my own students! – and was appalled by my reaction. If I couldn’t overcome it, surely, it was time to go: to become the old that is swept
out by the new. I was only in my middle thirties, and it was humiliating to be prematurely tone-deaf, prickly and antagonistic.

This defensiveness was personal, almost neurotic. I felt
offended
by post-structuralism, and (as any psychotherapist would tell you) there is something in need of analysis in such heated
resistance and denial. Derrida makes the point himself, with uncharacteristic concision and elegance: ‘Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their
institution.’ That would be me.

And yet, to be fair, there was plenty to admire in this new discourse, if one were allowed to pick and choose. From Lacan, for instance, there was the arresting concept of
absence
, a way
of attending carefully to what isn’t there, and is thus present in its very absence. Trivially, like Sartre’s Monsieur Simonnot in
Les Mots
, whose non-attendance at a party
seemed so much more powerful than anyone else’s presence; more provocatively, in Freud’s account of women, where lack of a penis becomes a defining quality. The further implications of
the notion of absence, as applied to Freud, were to become a major topic for me in the coming years.

From Derrida my major borrowing was the idea of using concepts ‘under erasure’, which is a clumsy phrase that I try never to
say
, but which has proven conceptually useful. The
idea, first mooted by Heidegger, is that there is a set of concepts which one needs, but which are nonetheless inadequate. We have already noticed the process in Philip Roth’s need to use the
term ‘self’, while at the same time denying its existence. Derrida’s method is straightforward, if curious: first you write the word which is causing you difficulty, then cross it
out, and then you print both the word and the deletion. Because the word is conceptually compromised, you have to cross it out; since it is necessary, it has to be employed.

Think, for instance, of
Women in Love
, in which Rupert Birkin professes himself disgusted by the very concept ‘love’, all that merging and mingling, the two-as-one loss of
identity and separateness. But, asks his wife Ursula plaintively, ‘don’t you love me?’ And he does. Being ‘imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts’, he has
to use what the language allows him. The received word is worn out, inadequate. If he has to use it at all, he wishes at the same time to disavow it. Love? Yuck. Cross it out. Do you love me? Sure.
This rings true: we’ve all experienced something similar, though it makes it tricky writing a love letter.

But the fact that one can root about in the post-structuralist miasma and find some things worth taking home does not endear one to the whole project. If you want really to understand your
post-structuralism, you have to correlate the new form of language to its essential form of life. Get yourself a table and some companions at Deux Magots, drink a lot of espresso, smoke Gitanes,
talk all night, shrug and wave your hands about, purge all specificity and observation from your vocabulary and replace it with abstraction. Close your eyes, philosophize, and it will all make
sense in a way quite inconceivable in a senior common room at an English university.